Facebook is challenging Twitch and YouTube for video game live streaming supremacy with the release of its new Games SDK for PC. After testing Live streaming from games like Overwatch from developers like Blizzard since 2016, today Live broadcasting from PC games to the News Feed opens to all developers. And Facebook will let them reward fans who watch by providing in-game items or bonuses. For example, beneath the comments reel, users might see a promotion like “Watch Paladins streams for a chance to earn random loot to use in-game.”

The potential for viral growth and sales could convince tons of game developers to bake in Facebook’s new SDK, while players could use the simple broadcasting feature to reach a big audience — though one not as dedicated to gaming as on other platforms. Viewers might choose to watch on Facebook because they get rewarded there. Facebook meanwhile benefits because game streams create compelling niche content that can drive long viewing sessions, helping Facebook monetize viewers in the moment with ads while locking them deeper into the platform long-term.

Facebook is also hooking up developers with deeper analytics through custom “app events” that are now available on PC as well as web and mobile. Game developers can also integrate Facebook’s enhanced Friend Finder feature that lets them play with friends and now see “Key Player Stats” about other people they want to join up with to keep playing together. Developers who want access to the SDK can sign up here.

The question will be if a catch-all mainstream social network can succeed in such a niche content space. 800 million people play Facebook-connected games each month. But not everyone’s real-world friends care about video games or want to watch their buddies play, so broadcasts could fall flat if they don’t find the particular subset who love gaming. On networks like Twitch or corners of YouTube, people are there specifically to watch game stream. So Facebook will have to use rapid feature development, and it’s size and potential for audience growth to attracts streamers, viewers, and developers. Otherwise gamers might stay where they never feel embarrassed about their passion.

I’ll be honest: When I first got the pitch for “the first blockchain-based video game console,” I assumed it must be some kind of gimmick.

But Jimmy Chen, co-founder and CEO of Blok.Party, said the Ethereum blockchain is “a critical part of this experience,” allowing his team to create “this seamless bridge between the digital and physical worlds.”

Today, Blok.Party is unveiling its PlayTable console, which combines elements of tabletop and console gaming.

This isn’t the first time someone’s tried to incorporate real-world objects into video games — for example, there was Disney Infinity, which shut down a couple of years ago. But by using blockchain technology, Chen said he can avoid many of the pitfalls that tripped up previous efforts.

For one thing, instead of manufacturing new toys and pieces for every game, PlayTable uses RFID tags, which can be attached to existing objects. So players can use the tags to incorporate their own toys and cards into the games.

“We’ve been trying to make toys smart for a very, very long time, but all we’ve been doing is stuffing resistors and transistors inside of them, making them incresingly more inaccessible,” Chen said. Blok.Party, in contrast, is “creating a data set that is inexpensive, that can easily attach to the physical object.”

He demonstrated PlayTable for me using Battlegrid, a card-based fantasy duel game developed by Blok.Party, which Chen described as “if Magic the Gathering, Hearthstone and Skylanders had a baby.” I won’t pretend that I followed all the ins and outs of the battle, but I saw that Chen could place different cards and pieces down and the table would recognize them and bring the related characters into play.

“The core of it, the physical manifestation of it that exists only in one space, has proven to be fairly difficult [in the past],” Chen added. “By creating that backend infrastructure, we can make the system a lot more successful. The element that blockchain really enables is this idea of having a truly unique, open dataset that people can contribute to and can build on top of.”

Chen said Blok.Party is working with third-party developers to create about 25 different titles, some of them based on classic games like poker and mah jong.

The PlayTable is currently available for pre-order at a discounted price of $349. (The company says the regular price will be $599.) The plan is to ship the console in the fourth quarter of this year.

We had all but forgotten about Tamagotchis. But those attention-starved little creatures are coming back.

Today, My Tamagotchi Forever launches on Google Play and the App Store. For those of you who didn’t ride the wave of handheld digital pets in the late 90s and early aughts, or those of you who are too young to have participated, here’s the gist:

Tamagotchis were little digital pets that lived inside a small handheld device. What made Tamagotchis interesting is that they were on a real schedule, needing food and attention on a daily basis. If you ignored your Tamagotchi for a few days, it would die. It was a high stakes game.

Within the game, each Tamagotchi has a sleep meter, a hunger meter, an entertainment meter, and a bathroom meter. Users must fulfill the needs of the Tamagotchi in order to keep it happy and earn virtual currency to buy equipment for entertainment and food. Users can earn coins by playing mini-games in the entertainment section of the app.

Where My Tamagotchi Forever strays from its ancestors is in-app purchases. The game lets you skip past certain necessities, like waiting for your Tamagotchi to sleep, by purchasing Diamonds.

Given that this game is geared towards children, you could see how users could quickly rack up a bill, as some of the in-app purchases are as expensive as $99.

]]>http://directtechnews.com/my-tamagotchi-forever-brings-the-90s-to-your-smartphone/feed/0Volley’s voice games for smart speakers have amassed over half a million monthly usershttp://directtechnews.com/volleys-voice-games-for-smart-speakers-have-amassed-over-half-a-million-monthly-users/
http://directtechnews.com/volleys-voice-games-for-smart-speakers-have-amassed-over-half-a-million-monthly-users/#respondFri, 16 Mar 2018 16:50:37 +0000http://directtechnews.com/volleys-voice-games-for-smart-speakers-have-amassed-over-half-a-million-monthly-users/

The rapid consumer adoption of smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home has opened opportunities for developers creating voice apps, too. At least that’s true in the case of Volley, a young company building voice-controlled entertainment experiences for Amazon Alexa and Google Home. In less than a year, Volley has amassed an audience north of 500,000 monthly active users across its suite of voice apps, and has been growing that active base of users at 50 to 70 percent month-over-month.

The company was co-founded by former Harvard roommates and longtime friends, Max Child and James Wilsterman, and had originally operated as an iOS consultancy. But around a year and a half ago, Volley shifted its focus to voice instead.

“When we were running the iOS business, we were always sort of hacking around on games and some stuff on the side for fun,” explains Child. “We made a trivia game for iOS. And we made a Facebook Messenger chatbot virtual pet,” he says. The trivia game they built let users play just by swiping on push notifications — a very lightweight form of gameplay they thought was intriguing. “Voice was sort of the obvious next step,” says Child.

Not all their voice games have been successful, however. The first to launch was a game called Spelling Bee that users struggled with because of Alexa’s difficulties in identifying single letters — it would confuse a “B,” “C,” “D” and “E,” for example. But later titles have taken off.

Volley’s name-that-tune trivia game “Song Quiz” was its first breakout hit, and has grown to become the No. 1 game by reviews. The game today has a five-star rating across 8,842 reviews.

Another big hit is Volley’s “Yes Sire,” a choose-your-own-adventure style storytelling game that’s also at the top of Alexa’s charts. It also has a five-star rating, across 1,031 reviews.

The company says it has more than a dozen live titles, with the majority on the Alexa Skill Store and a few for Google Assistant/Google Home. But it only has seven or eight in what you would consider “active development.”

Unlike some indie developers who are struggling to generate revenue from their voice applications, Volley has been moderately successful thanks to Amazon’s developer rewards program — the program that doles out cash payments to top performing skills. While the startup didn’t want to disclose exact numbers, it says it’s earning in the five-figure range monthly from Amazon’s program.

In addition, Volley is preparing to roll out its own monetization features, including subscriptions and in-app purchases of add-on packs that will extend gameplay.

The company’s games have been well-received for a variety of reasons, but one is that they allow people to play together at the same time — like a modern-day replacement for family game night, perhaps.

“I think a live multiplayer experience with your family or people you’re good friends with, where you can have a fun time together in a room is fairly unusual. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I don’t crowd around my iPhone and play games with my friends. And even with consoles there are significant barriers in understanding how to play,” says Child.

“I think that voice enables the live social experience in a way that anyone from five years old to 85 years old can pick up immediately. I think that’s really special. And I think we’re just at the beginning. I’m not going to say we’ve got it all figured out — but I think that’s powerful and unique to these platforms,” he adds.

Volley raised more than a million in seed funding ahead of joining Y Combinator’s Winter 2018 class, in a round led by Advancit Capital. Other investors include Amplify.LA, Rainfall, Y Combinator, MTGx, NFX and angels Hany Nada, Mika Salmi and Richard Wolpert.

Facebook’s Instant Games are now open to all developers, Facebook announced this week in advance of the Game Developers Conference. First launched in 2016, the platform lets developers build mobile-friendly games using HTML5 that work on both Facebook and Messenger, instead of requiring users to download native apps from Apple or Google’s app stores.

The Instant Games platform kicked off its launch a couple of years ago with 17 games from developers like Bandai Namco, Konami, Taito, Zynga and King, who offered popular titles like Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and Words with Friends. The following year, the platform had grown to 50 titles and became globally available. But it wasn’t open to all – only select partners.

In addition to getting users to spend more time on Facebook’s platform, Instant Games provides Facebook with the potential for new revenue streams now that Facebook is moving into game monetization.

In October, Facebook said it would begin to test interstitial and rewarded video ads, as well as in-app purchases. The tools were only available to select developers on what was then an otherwise closed platform for Facebook’s gaming partners.

Now, says Facebook, all developers can build Instant Games as the platform exits its beta testing period.

Alongside this week’s public launch, Facebook introduced a handful of new features to help developers grow, measure and monetize their games.

This includes the launch of the ads API, which was also previously in beta.

In-app purchases, however, are continuing to be tested.

Developers will also have access to Facebook’s Monetization Manager, where they can track manage ads and track how well ad placements are performing; as well as a Game Switch API for cross-promoting games across the platform, or creating deep links that work outside Facebook and Messenger.

Facebook says it also updated how its ranking algorithm surfaces games based on users’ recent play and interests, and updated its in-game leaderboards, among other things.

Soon, Instant Game developers will be able to build ad campaigns in order to acquire new players from Facebook. These new ad units, when clicked, will take players directly into the game where they can begin playing.

Since last year, Facebook Instant Games have grown to nearly 200 titles, but the company isn’t talking in-depth about their performance from a revenue perspective.

It did offer one example of a well-performing title, Basketball FRVR, which is on track to make over 7-digits in ad revenue annually, and has been played over 4.2 billion times.

]]>http://directtechnews.com/facebook-opens-instant-games-to-all-developers/feed/0Google is using Maps to turn every video game into an earth-sized epichttp://directtechnews.com/google-is-using-maps-to-turn-every-video-game-into-an-earth-sized-epic/
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Video games are about to look a lot more like the real world. If you’ve enjoyed the thrill of driving through GTA V and spying out Los Angeles landmarks, then that’s a sentiment you’re probably going to start feeling a lot more often while you play video games.

Google is making its Maps API play nice with video game designers, giving them access to the real world’s geography and geometry, throwing 100 million 3D buildings, landmarks and more into developer’s design repertoires. Game studios will be able to use these maps to serve as the basis of their digital environments with all of the models turned into GameObjects in the Unity game engine that are ready to be tweaked and have new textures applied to them.

In practice, that means developers could easily turn New York City into a medieval metropolis, or switch up some textures and change up everything again into some vast alien world. The gaming flavor of Maps API takes a lot of work away from developers that are building vast empires.

“Building on top of GoogleMaps’ global infrastructure means faster response times, the ability to scale on demand, and peace of mind knowing that your game will just work,” a company blog post on the topic read.

The update also means quite a lot to game developers stylizing augmented reality games that generally call on local maps to orient users in the game world. With this update, developers using ARCore will be able to take the worlds they’re building and slap them onto local maps, giving users a uniquely customized experience wherever they are.

The company is already working with several game developers to build this into new titles (including Walking Dead: Your World andJurassic World Alive ), they will be showing off more on how this works at GDC in San Francisco next week.

Myst is a strange title: essentially a Hypercard stack so big it had to be loaded on a CD-ROM, it was also one of the most intriguing and visually exciting games to come out in years. It has aged poorly, but Cyan, its developer, may be giving it a fresh coat of paint for the game’s 25th anniversary.

The company posted a simple image to myst.com of the “Myst” book from the game, with a Post-it note reading “25” attached to the front. What could it be?

A remaster? That happened in 2000. Not a real-time, prettied-up version of the game — that came out in 2015. And not a new title with Myst heritage — Cyan announced its new VR game Firmament last week.

The prettier version of Myst

It could, of course, be a “realMyst” version of the sequel, Riven, or an update to one of Cyan’s other, less famous follow-ups.

There’s even the possibility that it’s going to be a new sequel or prequel done in the style of Obduction, Cyan’s interesting but frustrating latest game. Perhaps the name recognition of Myst (among those old enough to remember when it was the hot new thing) will give it a boost.

The official 25th anniversary isn’t until September 24, though, so there’s plenty of time for more clues. Although if they’re as obtuse as those from the game itself, we may not learn much.

Over the last year or so daily fantasy sports companies like FanDuel and DraftKings have shifted their focus towards building products that are simple enough for even casual sports fans to play.

Today FanDuel is announcing their latest product designed for casual sports fans, called Bracket Pick’em. The game is dead simple – users pick five NCAA teams at the start of the March Madness, and the longer those teams stay in the tournament the more points users get.

Of course there is some weighting build in – so you couldn’t just pick five of the top ranked teams. Instead, the combined sum of your five teams has to equal 20 or more, and points will be awarded based on team seed and round, so wins by lower seeds and wins later in the tournament will be worth more points.

For example, you could draft four #1 seeds and one #16 seed, or four #3 seeds and one #8 seed team. Any combination of five teams works as long as their combined seeds add up to 20 or more.

All games will be free, but FanDuel is giving away $25,000 total in cash prizes to winners.

Daily fantasy sports companies have had issues in the past with college games due to strict NCAA rules on using teams’ and player’s names and likeness. This game is the first time FanDuel has released an NCAA-focused game since the platform agreed to suspend all college contests in 2016. The company said there wasn’t any discussion with the NCAA regarding this new game. “We felt [a conversation] was unnecessary as Bracket Pick’em is unrelated to our DFS offerings. It’s free and focuses on the teams in the tournaments, not drafting a fantasy lineup with NCAA players“, explained FanDuel.

Bracket Pick’em is the first time FanDuel has released a game that lets users pick teams instead of players. Spending time researching and drafting players is too complex and time consuming for casual fans, and if these companies want to scale they’re going to need to appeal to a much wider range of users with games like these.

There’s no arguing that playing fantasy games while watching professional sports improves the fan experience. The key is just figuring out how to build games that appeal to both die hard sports fans and the average person who only tunes into sports for the big games like playoffs and finals games.

This is the best news you’ll hear all day: Super Smash Bros. is coming to the Nintendo Switch this year. Nintendo dropped a new teaser for the game, which is as yet untitled, during its Nintendo Direct webcast on Thursday.

If you’re not familiar with the franchise, you are living a sad, unfulfilling existence. Actually, though, you should know about Nintendo’s brawler fighting game series, in which popular characters from Nintendo’s most successful game franchises battle it out in whimsical, platform-filled arenas.

We don’t know much about the game yet — the trailer features characters you’d expect to have in the game, like Mario and Link. But we do know it’s coming sometime this year (likely closer to holiday season, if I had to guess).

This is exciting now just because Super Smash Bros. is a good franchise, but also because the Switch is a near-perfect platform for fighting games, and especially this series’ brand of local multiplayer-friendly fun.

]]>http://directtechnews.com/nintendo-is-bringing-super-smash-bros-to-switch-in-2018/feed/0Fortnite is coming to iOS, will sport cross play with PC and PS4http://directtechnews.com/fortnite-is-coming-to-ios-will-sport-cross-play-with-pc-and-ps4/
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Fornite is on fire. The popular game takes the familiar artistic direction and freemium structure of popular mobile games and combines it with the last-person-standing gameplay directive of other viral titles like PUBG to get users running and gunning through its maps.

The game will be expanding beyond its home on consoles and PC/Mac with the launch of “Fortnite Mobile” in iOS next week. Starting Monday, players can begin signing up for an invite to play on iOS. The company says it will be adding players over “the coming months” so it sounds like this is still going to be very much in the trial phase.

If you’re expecting things to be pared down from the desktop and console varieties of the title, you’d be amiss. Epic Games claims that Fortnite will boast the “same gameplay, same map, same content, same weekly updates.”

What is perhaps most interesting is that the iOS version is going to support cross play with PS4 and PC, a really interesting move that could be game-changing or lead mobile players into an arena where they don’t have a chance. How everything will handle on the touch controls is probably the chief question; it seems pretty unlikely that controls on an iPhone or iPad will be able to trump players with a keyboard or controller, but we’ll obviously have a better idea at launch.

Epic Games also says support for Android will be coming “in the next few months.”